Book Reviews
Reviewed by:
Jeremy Griffin
As a native of Louisiana, I followed closely the events surrounding the 2010 BP oil spill. I remember the grisly footage of the black oil jet spurting up from the floor of the Gulf, and I recall the succession of fruitless strategies put into effect until finally the breach was contained. But most of all, I remember the feelings of frustration this evoked in residents, who were virtually... more
Reviewed by:
Patrick Whitfill
Sean Bishop’s debut collection of poems is not, as the foreword states, for the faint of heart. These are poems of longing and loss, of wishing and wishes, of desire, and of the unequivocally true knowledge that wishes do not, and will not, come true. These poems unsettle the ground and call into question our own connections with our family and with language, as well as our religious and secular... more
Reviewed by:
Yunte Huang
“Why do I voyage so much? And write so little?” Lawrence Ferlinghetti asked himself as he sat on a bus in Mexico, traveling from Manzanillo to Guadalajara, surrounded by women with hands like hens’ feet, amused by the sound of a rooster onboard or a goat “crying in a stubble field behind some house.” As the ancient bus climbed even more ancient mountain roads, Ferlinghetti—poet, publisher,... more
Reviewed by:
Nick Ripatrazone
Novelist Thomas McGuane says there are cowboys who are as “deluded” about their trade as are workers in the “entrepreneurial class.” Romance about ranch work means “their hold is tenuous and they're always on the cusp of violence or rage about being in that situation, and they're naturally in conflict with their bosses.” Cowboys used to be in it for the long haul; they were “lifetime admired.”... more
Reviewed by:
Mitch Nakaue
“When but a child, I learned that our ancestors came out of the trees, stood upright on the savannahs, and became human.” So begins John Leland’s essay collection Readings in Wood. A nature writer, Leland makes his home in the southern Appalachian mountains of Rockbridge County, Virginia, a region known for its wilderness and as a repository of American history dating back to the... more
Pages
Reviewed by:
Julie Marie Wade
Denise Duhamel is one of my favorite poets and one of the most captivating, comforting, challenging writers I have ever read. But because she is “established” in the genre and I am only “emerging,” I realized with some chagrin as I was reading Blowout, her newest and best poetry collection to date, that I will never have a chance to blurb one of Duhamel’s books. We are poets of two generations. I belong to the one that comes after—and... more
Reviewed by:
Rebecca Morgan Frank
The opening section of Tanya Larkin’s debut collection, My Scarlet Ways, selected by judge Denise Duhamel for the 2011 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, sweeps us into the world of girls, but these are timeless, hell-raising girls with a kick and bite. The second poem could be read as an ars poetica of sorts: “Sisters, don’t let sisters / ride the chandelier. It’s just a Turkish tea set / with a drunken seductive chime / like the... more
Reviewed by:
Virginia Konchan
The landscape of Rusty Morrison's newest poetry collection, After Urgency, is one rid not only of music but the hope of its return.From “Verdancies of repetition”:Struck again and again, destiny might never chime.Toss consonants against the vowels for luck of true correspondence.Rhyme-fellows remain distinct even at a distance, like two wings frame the jay’s flight.Harbor the hidden accentual in the beautiful repose after vowelling.... more
Reviewed by:
Micah Bateman
“... And Lord the sound of their wings / is the sound of the leaves...”—Shane McCrae, from “Crows,” Mule THE WAY THINGS WORKis by admitting or opening away. This is the simplest form of current [...] The way things work is by solution, resistance lessened or increased and taken advantage of. The way things work is that finally we believe they are there, common and able to illustrate themselves. Wheel, kinetic flow, rising and falling... more
Reviewed by:
Rebecca van Laer
If you’ve read the back of a poetry book recently, you’ve probably learned that many contemporary poets are “reimagining the possibilities of lyric poetry,” “challenging the conventional boundaries of poetic form,” or otherwise transgressing and subverting the supposedly rigid limits of the lyric poem. This sort of rhetoric has been applied to prose poetry, to narrative poetry, and to professedly political poetry. The language of subversion has... more
